Jane Austen and Her Country-house Comedy

by W. H. Helm

If we seek in our memories for scenes of particular excellence we shall recall with renewed pleasure the rehearsals (Mansfield Park), the encounters between Elizabeth and Mr. Collins and Elizabeth and Lady Catherine (Pride and Prejudice), the second and last proposal of Wentworth to Anne Elliot (Persuasion), the picnic at Box Hill and the dance at the "Crown" (Emma). In all of these the spontaneity of the narrative, the vitality of the talk and the vividness with which the circumstances are realized with the smallest amount of description show the author's art in its most delightful vein.

It is often in little touches, generally satirical, that Jane Austen reveals the characters of her people. Lady Middleton, whose "reserve was a mere calmness of manner with which sense had nothing to do"; Mary Bennet, whom, when her sisters visited her, "they found, as usual, deep in the study of thorough bass and human nature, and had some new extracts to admire, and some new observations of threadbare morality to listen to"; the gushing Louisa Musgrove, who declared that if she loved a man as Mrs. Croft loved the Admiral, she "would always be with him, nothing should ever separate" them, and that she "would rather be overturned by him, than driven safely by anybody else"; Mr. Allen, a country gentleman of fortune who "did not care about the garden, and never went into it"; and General Tilney, poring over pamphlets when he ought to be in bed, blinding his eyes "for the good of others" who would never benefit in the least by his exertions; the heartless and humbugging Mrs. Norris, whose plentiful talk about helping her poor, child-burdened sister ended in her "writing the letters" while others sent substantial assistance—these, and many other entertaining people live for us largely from such casual peeps into their natures and sentiments.

Jane Austen rarely describes a man or woman as possessing qualities which are not justified by the evidence she offers. Almost the only notable exceptions are Mrs. Dashwood, of whom we are told that "a man could not very well be in love with either of her daughters, without extending the passion to her," but who does not herself give us any reason to regard her as other than an affectionate, well-meaning, and injudicious person, and Captain Wentworth, who is stated to have been witty, but who usually manages to restrain his wit when we happen to meet him.

The many parsons of the novels are at once too steady and too prosperous to be in accord with either of the types of eighteenth-century clergy most frequently conveyed by the literature of their period. They may not have done much for their parishioners beyond preaching to them once or twice a week, and sending them soup occasionally, but they set them good examples by conducting themselves decently and soberly. Of their "views" we know little. Indeed, few things are more remarkable in these novels, in the light of later fiction, than that almost complete absence of any reference to dogmatic religion to which attention has already been drawn. You may hunt through them all and hardly find two definite statements that, except to see what the vicar's bride was like, any of the characters went to church. We know that the parsons preached, but whether there was any one to hear their sermons we are usually left in doubt. In fact, as Dr. Whately puts it, the author's religion is "not at all obtrusive." His favourable view of Jane Austen's influence may be contrasted with Robert Hall's of Maria Edgeworth's: "In point of tendency I should class her books among the most irreligious I ever read.... She does not attack religion nor inveigh against it, but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue without it."

It has frequently been said that the atmosphere of Jane Austen's books is "Church of England," and this is in a sense true. She assumes that the squires of whom she writes are adherents of Church and State, much as a provincial clergyman wrote quite recently in his Parish Magazine: "It is generally taken for granted that Church is the only possible religion for an English gentleman." We meet with no Romish priests or Methodist preachers, not so much as a member of the Society of Friends, but, on the other hand, we meet with no one who talks against faith. It was a period when the Church itself had become apathetic, when pluralists abounded, and when many rectors lived comfortably on their great tithes, far from the parishes which they left to the care of curates who were often worse off than gamekeepers. A young man went into the Church, if there was a good living to be had, just as he went to the Bar if his uncle was a flourishing attorney, or into the navy if his friends had influence with the Board of Admiralty. Many parsons, if they were well-to-do and fond of society, did not even wear any distinctive dress. One meets vicars and curates to-day, in summer-time, wearing green ties and grey tweed suits, and even a bishop has been known to abandon his episcopal uniform when he was away on a holiday. But, to take an instance from the novels, Catherine Morland, who has met Henry Tilney at a dance in Bath, and meets him again at the Pump-room or elsewhere, does not know he is a clergyman until she is told. The Church was merely a profession for most of those who entered it. "Did Henry's income depend solely on his living," says General Tilney, "he would not be well provided for. Perhaps it may seem odd, that with only two younger children, I should think any profession necessary to him; and certainly there are moments when we could all wish him disengaged from every tie of business." The most conscientious clergyman in the Austen Comedy is Edmund Bertram, who really seems to have wished to do his duty, and thereby damaged his chance of marrying Mary Crawford.

The scanty reference to the observances of religion in the novels bears on the worldly life of the age, as we know it from those who were of it and saw it at its centre of activity, London society. Doctor Warner, George Selwyn's chaplain, who attracted large congregations by his eloquent preaching, and who was an avowed sceptic away from church, who toadied the rich and noble, and told stories that delighted the Duke of Queensberry, was no rare type of the clergy of his time, and we may be pretty certain that Jane Austen's Mr. Collins (who was not at all likely to tell an improper story himself) would have found it very difficult to believe that so exalted a personage as "Old Q." was unfit for the society of clergymen.

Jane frankly admitted that she knew too little of literature, philosophy, and science, to allow her adequately to draw the character of a scholarly and serious parson. "The comic side of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy of which I know nothing, or at least occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving." According to her brother and her nephew, Jane was better educated than she here makes out, knowing French, and a good deal of Italian. Whether we believe her or not about her literary and linguistic limitations, we can have small doubt that she knew very little indeed about science and philosophy, in spite of being so much of a philosopher. In those days, when Cuvier was bringing his genius in palæontology to bear on the recovery of lost types, and preparing a way for Darwin, whose own grandfather was bravely aiding in the clearance of paths in hitherto trackless jungles of prejudice and obscurantism, science was scarcely regarded as a decent subject of conversation before ladies in country drawing-rooms, and it never obtrudes itself at Hartfield or at Mansfield Park.

If we may read through every word of Jane's novels without discovering any expression of dogmatic belief, we may equally find no direct evidence, unless in that one story of Elinor and Willoughby, of acceptance of the chilly Deism which had eaten so deeply into the intellects both of laymen and clergy. The unrest, both moral and physical, which had spread from Paris, from Holland, and from Switzerland over the whole of Western Europe at that time, finds little place for its fidgeting in the families to whom we are here introduced. People, with the rare exceptions of a Wickham or a Willoughby, are born, live, and die, in peace with the world and in general harmony with their environments.

Admirable as Jane Austen's pictures of country life in house and garden are, they are not to be accepted as literal transcripts. She was, before all else, an artist, and the more an artist is devoted to finicking reproduction of exact details the further is he removed from art. Almost every author, if he writes with sincerity, must draw his own moral portrait in his best work. In a literal sense there is no reason to suppose that novelists often give us studies of themselves in any degree comparable with the self-portraits of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Madame Vigée le Brun or the moderns in the Uffizi Gallery. Sometimes, of course, as in Villette and Delphine, an author reports episodes in his life almost as they happened, and it is certain, save in the rarest cases, that something of an author's mental processes is reproduced in all his creatures, "bad" as well as "good," though he is more likely to show his own temperament and experience in a prominent and sympathetic character than in any other. Very few writers follow the example of Milton, of whom Coleridge declared "his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost all his Eve, are all John Milton." The common mistake, a mistake so obvious that we may wonder at its continuance, is such a close identification of the author with any one of his creations. Thus, because "Vivian Grey is Disraeli himself," Disraeli is to be credited with the strange experiences of that uneasy hero among foreign politicians and card-sharpers; and because "Jane Eyre is Charlotte Brontë," Charlotte Brontë must at least have wished to unite herself with a wild man whose wife had gone mad. There were no doubt readers of Goethe's Faust who, ignoring the legend, thought the author had bargained with Mephisto and, it "goes without saying" (Marianne Dashwood is not within hearing), that "Hamlet is Shakespeare." Such arbitrary reasoning may account for the general confusion of Frankenstein with the creature that he made.